In recent years, web services and business process management (BPM) systems have become more and more widely used among various organizations. A business enterprise typically desires to integrate all of its data and processes into a single and unified system. For example, an organization may automate a business process by having a computer perform certain activities of the business, such as receiving a sales order, sending a notification to a client, or reminding a human participant of work that needs to be performed.
While automation of such business processes has posed a number of difficulties, software has become an increasingly important solution component of BPM. By implementing software BPM suites, enterprises are becoming more and more able to increase productivity, performance, profits and decrease inefficiency due to various factors.
Nevertheless, a multitude of inefficiencies and problems remain in the BPM software world. The ability of such systems to efficiently integrate into other existing systems, to monitor, improve and expose business processes, and to generally enable efficient service oriented architecture (SOA) deployments can be improved and these improvements can have significant advantages in business productivity.
In many large project instances, organizations implement an enterprise service bus (ESB) in order to accelerate deployment of service-oriented architecture (SOA) through scalable and extensible integration of service infrastructure. For example, the AquaLogic® Service Bus available from BEA Systems, Inc., can connect, mediate and manage services dynamically and provide an enterprise-ready service intermediary that protects against costs and disruptions of ongoing service changes. In general, such enterprise service buses have been deployed, managed and maintained separately from the business process modeling systems described above, much to the detriment of various persons and organizations trying to maintain efficiency and reliability of such systems.
In light of the foregoing, a system is desirable, which is able to integrate the various web service management systems (such as the service bus) with the business process modeling (BPM) system in order to increase efficiency, synchronize various components and enable bidirectional communications between the two systems. Applicants have identified these as well as other needs, which currently exist in the art, in coming to conceive the subject matter of the present disclosure.